The Manosphere Got Stoicism Backwards

The manosphere has spent years quoting the Stoics to young men. Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus. Seneca. The version they sell, anger as strength, dominance as virtue, emotion as weakness, is the opposite of what those philosophers actually wrote.

In Meditations 11.18, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his private journal that gentleness is more manly than rage. Seneca, in Letter 63, wrote that we may weep but must not wail, and admitted he had been overcome by grief himself. Epictetus, in Discourses 2.10, said the man who turns into a wild beast has lost something essential. Musonius Rufus argued in Lecture IV that virtue is the same in man and woman. Cleanthes, Zeno's successor as head of the Stoic school, wrote a whole treatise on that idea in the 3rd century BCE.

This episode walks through what the original Stoics actually said about being a man, why the manosphere reading gets it backwards, and four traits of the Stoic version of manhood you can test yourself against.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

You may have heard of Marcus Aurelius, he's the face of thousands of TikTok videos, and he wrote in his private journal that a gentleness is more manly than rage. That's not my reframe, that's all him. For the last few years a certain version of stoic masculinity has taken over the internet. Cold eyes, marble busts, quotes about controlling your emotions, and many young men have looked at this and thought, this is what this philosophy is for. It isn't. I've spent the better part of 20 years looking and testing at different operating systems for being a man, whether that's meditation, Buddhism, plant medicine, martial arts, self-improvement, in general, reading, travel, therapy. The whole spread. And throughout all of this experimentation, Stoicism is the philosophy of life that I keep coming back to. Not the version that you see that promotes this very specific kind of control your emotions, masculinity, but the actual stoicism found in the ancient texts. And in this video, I want to explain to you why it's so important and how Stoicism can provide us with the operating manual for being a man. Let me describe a type of video you might have already seen. Black and white, AI voiceover, captions on screen, and very muscular jacked stoics with grain effects, glitch effects, flashy editing zooms, and quotes like real men feel nothing and emotions are for the weak. This is what most people now mean when they say stoic. It's a whole aesthetic. One philosopher who's tracked it, Massimo Pigliucci, uses a name for it. He calls it broicism, an attempt to hijack the language of stoic philosophy to sell young men a version of manhood built on emotional suppression, dominance, and being untouchable. And look, I don't think most people watching those videos are in bad faith. A lot of them are lonely, and the numbers on this are pretty grim. Fifteen percent of the men in the US now say they have no close friends. That's a fivefold increase since 1990. The Surgeon General has called male loneliness a public health crisis, and every serious report on young men's mental health in the last few years tells the same story. Record rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking, especially in men under 25. There's a real crisis, and you could see on Netflix some big hits have been the series Adolescence and Louis Thoreau's Inside the Manosphere. The thing that these works are talking about are real. And so naturally, young men are looking for answers. They're struggling. And when they see on the internet this version of Stoicism or philosophy that promises lots of control and lots of strength, they want to click. I would have probably clicked if I was 18. The problem is what they're clicking on isn't the philosophy. It's like a cartoon version of the philosophy. And let me be clear about what the ancient Stoics said themselves. They were completely against this version of Stoicism. They weren't subtle about it. They explicitly warned against this, and I'll explain in some actual quotes now. If you've absorbed meditations through Instagram, you've probably got an impression of Marcus Aurelius as someone who had this ironclad mindset, unshakable, unstoppable, this man who trained himself out of feeling emotions. But if you actually read the meditations, which was a private journal, never meant to be published, you'll see that actually a lot of it's quite tender and soft. In book 11 of the Meditations, passage 18, Marcus is teaching himself or making a note to himself about what to do if he starts to feel an angry rage coming on. And this is what he says, this is Gregory Hayes' translation. Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on. It isn't manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human and therefore manlier. That's pretty profound, right? Gentleness is manlier than rage. And this is coming from the man who is the archetype of the warrior king, stone-faced iron emperor, the hero of the Broicism movement. And this is not a one-off kind of thing. If you look at Book One, the very beginning of Meditations, Marcus spends time thanking all of the people that have helped him in his life, showing deep gratitude for all of the things that they taught him. From his adoptive father, the Emperor Antonius Pius, mildness of temper, from his stoic tutor Apollonius of Chalceton, that the same man can be both most resolute and yielding, from the man he calls his brother Severus to believe that I am loved by my friends. He thanks his mother for moral education, and he thanks men for kindness, listening, willingness to be loved, compassion and tolerance. This is all in book one of the meditations, where Marcus is recording all of the things that he thinks make a good man. The stone faced emperor is a Hollywood fiction. The real man, Marcus Aurelius, opened up Book One by thanking women and gentlemen. Next, we will talk about Seneca, and he destroys the whole idea that men don't cry version of Stoicism in about two sentences. In letter 63, Seneca is writing to his friend Lucilius over the death of Lucilius' friend Flaccus. He's trying to consolidate. And this is what he says. Whereas the Broism version is don't feel anything at all. Shove those emotions down. Seneca is talking about regulation. The Broism movement talks about suppression. Very different things. And because Seneca is quite honest, he says something to Lucilius that many people wouldn't quote him as saying. Seneca lost one of his best friends, and he was consumed by grief himself. He says, I must be included among the examples of men who have been overcome by grief. Possibly the most famous stoic of the Roman world, admitting that he was overcome by grief, obviously weeping and sobbing and really feeling the pain. And this is the man the internet wants you to believe, had complete emotional equanimity in all situations, and was above it all, completely able to suppress all emotions. In the bro version of Stoicism, it's all about becoming colder and harder and tougher and more aggressive. But Epictetus actually says that if you become more aggressive, you don't gain manhood, you just lose your humanity. In the Discourses Book 2, Chapter 10, Epictetus talks about being a man. He says, If instead of being a man, a gentle and social being, you have become a wild beast, a mischievous, treacherous, biting animal, have you lost nothing? So for Epictetus, the base starting point of being a good human is to be gentle, polite, and social. If you downgrade to a wild animal, you've lost something. This is the opposite of the alpha animal framing. For Epictetus, going animal is a failure. Becoming more human is actually harder, rarer, and the thing to do. Fourth, and this one might be the most interesting, we're going to talk about a word. The word for courage, which is Andrea. This word is translated as manliness. It comes from aner, which means adult male, and has the same root as the word android. So Andrea or courage is one of the four cardinal virtues alongside temperance, wisdom, and justice. This gives an interesting question. If courage is translated as manliness, would the Stoics then say that this part of virtue is a man thing? And here's where it gets pretty good. No, they actually did the opposite. Zeno's successor as head of the Stoic school, a man called Cleanthes, wrote an entire treatise titled, and this is the actual title preserved in the ancient records, on the thesis that virtue is the same in man and woman. The treatise itself is lost. All we have is the title, which on its own tells you exactly where Stoicism stood on this. Musonius Rufus, the Roman Stoic who taught Epictetus, went further. He wrote a lecture called Should Daughters Receive the Same Education as Sons? Remember, this is first century Rome, and here's what he says in Cora Lutz's translation. There is not one set of virtues for a man and another for a woman. If then men and women are born by the same virtues, the same type of training and education must of necessity befit both men and women. So the Stoics took the word Andrea, which means manliness, and they made it universal. They claimed that courage is a form of knowledge, and that knowledge can be known by all humans alike. So if anyone tells you to man up and they use a stoic quote to justify it, the ancient Stoics themselves would be shaking their head and saying no, courage is for everyone. Okay, so what does this actually look like in the real world in practice? Philosophy, and especially ancient philosophy, is pretty pointless if it just stays in the realm of theory. So I'm going to give you now four ideas, guiding principles, or shapes that you can use to test if you're actually living this way of being a man, according to the ancient Stoics. One, you can name what you feel. This doesn't mean suppressing it, broadcasting it, just naming it. Research done by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA found that if you can actually add a label to the emotion you feel, you get reduced activity in the amygdala. This is called affect labeling. The amygdala is linked to threat processing. And the Stoics were doing this type of affect labeling thousands of years ago. That is what the meditations is. You notice an impression, thought, an impulse, and then you write about it, you journal, you make a note, and you try to process it and make the best choice and the best judgment moving forwards. If you try to suppress it, all you're doing is delaying it, and then it's going to come out in a messy, sideways fashion. Two, your strength is measured by what you don't do. Anyone can retaliate, anyone can snap back, anyone can lose their cool. But it's actually more powerful and more manly to be able to reply but choosing not to. Seneca has a whole book on anger called The Era, and his argument is that anger is not a display of strength, it's actually just a loss of control that's masquerading as power. Seneca calls anger in his book the era, a form of temporary madness or brief insanity. It's not a form of power. In fact, if you look at children and toddlers, you'll find that they get angry the minute they don't get their own way. So when adults exhibit this behavior, they are essentially irrational children in adult bodies. Three, you are the kind of man that people can tell the truth to. This is quite hard, right? So if you're the kind of person that your partner, your kids, your family, your friends try talking to you and you want to immediately jump in and fix it or give advice or make it more about you, that's not really strength. We could say that the stoic ideal for a man is not the kind of person that no one needs, but it's the kind of person that people will happily come to to share and to be validated and to talk to. If you look at Seneca's letters to Lucilius, there's a lot of warmth and love beneath the advice that Seneca is giving for you widen the circle. There's this philosophical Heracles who drew these concentric rings. He put us at the center, and then we have our family, our friends, our acquaintances, strangers, people in different countries, and on and on and on. And these rings get wider and wider. And he said that the goal of an ethical life is to draw these outer rings toward ourselves. The broicism version of Stoicism actually cuts these outer rings off and makes it all about this central inner circle, you. So our goal is ultimately to become more connected and more social and use our skills and our talents and our reason to better society and to create a better world for us all to live in. Now, here's the hard truth beneath all of this. The version of Stoicism that the internet has been peddling is something that the Stoics themselves would have had a word for. Pathe. This just means destructive emotions. And for the Stoics, pathe was a form of slavery. Fear dressed up as control, loneliness dressed up as freedom, pride dressed up as discipline. And Stoicism actually had an escape route from all of that, an escape route from pathe. And it wasn't about becoming unfeeling, but just giving you a playbook or a few guiding principles, an operating manual for becoming more human in a world that's constantly trying to make you less and constantly putting obstacles in front of you. We've seen that Marcus Aurelius, who, by the way, was a trained fighter and had armies at his disposal, thought that gentleness is more manly than rage. Seneca gave himself permission to weep, and Epictetus said that if we become a type of biting animal, we lose something. The goal is not to become someone made of stone, unfeeling, suppressed, untouchable. But it's much more simple than that. To become someone worth being, to live a life well lived. If this topic interests you and you'd like to learn more about the Stoic counters to the big claims in the Manosphere movement, I've created a video called The High Value Man is Actually a Slave. And in this video, I talk about the five main claims of the Manosphere, like wealth is a scoreboard and women are subordinate objects and these types of claims, and then show you what the Stoics would have said in response to this. If that sounds interesting and you'd like to go deeper, you can watch that video here. I appreciate you watching this video to the end instead of just bailing after the first minute. And I hope that these ideas have been useful, transformative, and provide a bit better guidance than some of the existing ideas floating around on the internet. I'll see you in the next video.